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Month: February 2021

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

Lately, I seem to be reading a lot of novels by women that are a revival of Greek mythology, novels based on classical Greek literature written mainly by men. There is Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (the first review I published on my blog) and Circe, and now A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. I really enjoyed reading A Thousand Ships. It’s a feminist retelling of the Trojan war which focuses on the women who are usually side-lined in epic tales about the male heroes of Greek and Troy, and it’s purpose is to show that women can be heroes too even if they don’t fight in wars (with the exception of the Amazons).

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. It is a novel about how identity is constructed. The central focus of The Vanishing Half is racial identity. It is about the Vignes sisters, identical twins Desiree and Stella, one of whom lives as a black woman while the other lives as a white woman and follows their lives through the decades spanning the 1950s to the early 1990s.

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Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson

Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson

Yellow Wife is at times a difficult novel to read. Not because it’s boring or poorly written, but because of its honest depiction of its subject matter: slavery in antebellum US. Sadeqa does not shy away from vividly describing the horrifying treatment of African American slaves by their white masters. I’m not going to go into detail as it was difficult enough to stomach it while reading it. There were a few scenes in this novel where I had to stop reading for a moment and talk myself back into reading more. I’m not sharing this with you to turn you away from reading this novel. I think you should read it. I just can’t believe that people would treat other people the way white slave owners treated their slaves. But I don’t want to turn this review of Yellow Wife into a discourse on slavery. This novel speaks for itself on that subject.

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The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni is a long read, but worth every moment I spent on it. I really enjoyed this novel! I was first interested in reading this novel when it was published in 2013, but unfortunately never got around to it at the time. Silly me! I could have had this novel in my life for so many years! If you enjoy historical fiction and are interested in supernatural creatures from other cultures, then I highly recommend you read this novel.

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